Psychoanalysis
This page will link to several professional papers I published in the International Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal Of Humanistic Psychology, The Middle Way and Yoga Journal. At that time, I was on the faculty of the College of Oriental Studies.
Included below is one I wrote in 1987 before I met Robert and became the fun guy I am today. Ken Wilber, Jack Engler, Dan Browne and I had been exchanging compliments about each other's works for two years until we fell out of love concerning what we each believed to be the basic nature of the phenomenal self, whether or not there was an evolution or maturation of the fantasy self and appropriate therapies at each stage. I believed the fantasy self was just that, a dream so-to-speak (a bad one), with no evolution possible. That is, the fantasy self has no existence; it is a concept with no reality behind it. If anything, the unfolding of consciousness itself creates the I, not the I evolving to find divine consciousness. Of course, writing at the time as a humanistic object-relations psychologist, I wrote from the perspective of stablizing the fantasy self in order to function in the world.
I did point out possible mechanisms by which the non-existent ego created itself out of spontaneous movements within consciousness. This self-created ego was the sense of I, which created its own needs, including preserving its illusiory existence.
After meeting Robert, all these psychological conceptualizations dropped away as irrelevant. Eventually, all conceptualizations dropped away as irrelevant and as an extremely unrewarding waste of perfectly good brain cells.
This is the best example I can give of wasting time in apparently meaningful activities. Back in the 80's, psychiatrists were going to Zen masters and Hindu Gurus looking for new directions in pointless research which did not help their patients at all.
However, if there is anyone out there who feels the need to torture themselves by introspecting the structure of the non-existent emotions and phenomenal self, knock yourself out.
One positive element of this paper is the description of a psychotherapy/meditative technique that I call 'microanalysis', where the person who supposedly exists, can supposedly focus on the various phenomenal aspects of their body-mind, such as the tactile and visual senses, as well as emotions and the inner fantasy world, which reveals the background of emptiness upon which this complex displays. This technique can be used to end emotional pain by 'atomizing' or shredding it into its many sub-components. It also familiarizes the apparent searcher with its own non-existence against the backdrop of emptiness, or Void.
When one introspects the apparent I, eventually the background of emptiness becomes the foreground, and eats up the both the I and the world.
To begin, click here on Transpersonal Synthesis.
